Advantages of DirectX 9 with Sage

[fullofnrg]

I have a Radeon 9000 Pro graphics card, and my TV is connected to the S-Video out.

I see a lot about DirectX support. The Radeon 9000 Pro only supports DirectX 8.1. I don't not play games and I mainly use it for normal use (browsing and OS maintenance) and for watching TV through Sage TV.

I was wondering if it is worth upgrading my card to one that supports DirectX 9 (i.e. will the quality of playback in SageTV be improved)??

Thanks for your help.

[stanger89]

Probably not if you're happy with the S-Video out. From what I've read, the main reasons to upgrade are:

The newer R9500+ cards have a little higher quality VGA out (maybe S-Vid not sure), and VMR9, the DX9 video renderer is reported to look slightly better than overlay on the new cards.

However, in your case, using S-Video, any benefit of VMR9 would be negated by the S-Video connection.

Now, if you have an HDTV you'll get a big improvement by changing to a better connection with your TV. Basically in order of increasing quality the connections go like this: RF < Composite < S-Video < Component (YPbPr) < RGB/VGA < DVI.

You might want to go look at the AVS forum, there's lots of good info about video cards there:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=26